A venture capitalist named Ben Casnocha shared a story on X last week about a friend at Google who was pulled aside by his manager and told not to use the term "all-hands"—common corporate speak for a meeting involving everyone on a company or a team. The reason? The term is insensitive because not everyone has hands. A spokesperson at Google confirmed the anecdote to Fortune, explaining it amounted to a "manager giving guidance to their team based on ongoing conversations around inclusion."
Casnocha's tweet received considerable attention, including from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who retweeted with the comment: "If you want to work at a company that won't bother you with this nonsense, consider applying for a role @coinbase. We just focus on building great products and updating the global financial system with crypto."
In an email to Fortune, Coinbase's chief people officer L.J. Brock explained the tweet by saying the company wants a workplace "free from distraction," and that telegraphing its culture has been an effective tool in recruiting talent. But beyond the HR niceties put forth by the companies' executives, there is also something much bigger going on—and how you view the controversy will depend on which view you have of politics and culture in Silicon Valley.
One view holds that Google's "all-hands" suggestion is just a gentle extension of a longtime effort by the company—along with the likes of other tech firms like Facebook and Microsoft—to ensure everyone who works there is treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. Words matter, and there are terms from the past many of us don't use anymore—it's not hard to think of examples—because they are denigrating and hurtful. And frankly, few of us miss them.
The other view is that DEI programs have run amok and given rise to a cadre of fanatics who delight in scouring the workplace for any verbal transgressions. Anyone who fails to toe the line on correct language—as determined by the Ivy League cultural hot houses from which they graduated—needs to be reeducated. This can take the form of forced diversity training (despite the ample evidence it doesn't work) or by siccing a social media mob on the miscreant. Even when the DEI overlords reach too far—as with Stanford's widely ridiculed “harmful language initiative”—they are unlikely to acknowledge it, and instead conclude any criticism of their efforts is rooted in racism.
You hear this second view in Silicon Valley far more often than you did a few years ago, in particular from Armstrong and others in the crypto world who have become more emboldened in challenging the corporate orthodoxies of Big Tech. This can be refreshing at a time when many people are exhausted by virtue signaling in the workplace and just want to do their jobs. But there is also a risk that anti-DEI figures like Armstrong will fail to recognize that "free from distraction" is a political agenda in its own right and can serve to alienate employees who do not look or act like them.
In a perfect world, the leaders of Google and Coinbase would sit down and come up with workplace policies that encourage inclusion without silly excesses like banning "all-hands." Alas, that's not the world we live in, so the debate will instead take the form of sniping on social media.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
